No mention of islam though, which was the next thing filtered.

"and two others that can block content forbidden under Islamic teachings. "

You can tell which one people have learned to fear. Islam is the future, because even anonymously, people have learned to fear them.

I'm just curious as to why you'd use that instead of any manufacturer or google's offering, since those are feature complete, have no ads and no in app purchases.

"I used it when options were worse, and I just like it the way it is" is a completely justifiable reason. A lot of things in our lives, there are better options but having to switch carries cognitive and time costs that are just not worth it.

Why would you want SMS app with "ads and in app purchases" when so many fully featured ad free with no in app purchases SMS apps exist?

What does it offer that others don't?

Everyone has their own message app, and outside US, almost no one uses it for anything other than SMS. For everything else, it's Whatsapp, Telegram, WeChat, Signal, etc.

It's interesting that google and other phone manufacturers lost this fight so comprehensively.

I am running FreeBSD with MATE.
Firefox seems to be using about 1.5GB - just running slashot.

49% of how much memory?
I am running FreeBSD with MATE. I am using firefox with two tabs open. I am also running jellyfin, and some other background stuff. And I am also running a terminal, and looking at "top" process.
My total active memory being used is 675MB. I have a total of 12GB Ram, and I have about 5200MB free.
Firefox does seem to be quite a hog.

"Fluid" intelligence is the ability to think, reason, solve problems, and learn things. "Crystallized" intelligence is your amassed knowledge.

These are technical terms used in the literature.

Intelligence is nature's guess as to how complex your environment will be... but there's an out. People with low fluid intelligence have to work harder to understand things, but if they put in the work they can amass a body of knowledge that rivals that of people with high fluid intelligence.

And of course, lots of people with high intelligence stop learning in their mid twenties. At that point they've conquered their environment and are living successful lives (good job, married, kids &c) so there's no real reason to push themselves. Lots and lots of people, even smart people, haven't read a single book in the last year - and this observation was true in the 1970's before the internet.

(And nowadays this is probably more accurate due to the appalling quality of information found on the internet.)

It's a question of training. We're evolved to believe what people say, it's a way of reducing the cognitive load of learning things (by believing what someone else has already figured out). We're not used to questioning the logic of someone else's beliefs.

As an example of this, note that Warren Buffet has built a career on identifying fallacies in business, google "Warren Buffet fallacies" for a list.

None of these fallacies is taught in school, everyone has to find them and figure them out on their own. And then you have to use them in your daily lives.

Almost no one is used to doing that, which leads to the current problems with AI.

Solar panels are the end product. If wars were to be fought, it would over the materials used to make solar panels.
BTW: I think almost all solar panels and wind turbines are made by China. Other countries could make them, but it would not be easy, and it could not happen overnight.

You mean the bird blenders that are also killing whales and dolphins?

As I understand it "renewable energy" means clear cutting forests and burning trees for energy.
Per unit of energy produced, burning trees is far more polluting that burning natural gas, or even diesel. Then you have the destruction of the forests.

Story notes that number changes massively every month and it went 3,5 > 2,5 > 5,3 across January, February and March this year.

This obviously isn't changes in user base, but changes in tracking combined with very low sample size, meaning it's wildly inaccurate.

Props to writer in that he didn't engage in mainstream media clickbait method of "we clickbait headline and then we spin a narrative for the entire story. And then we destroy our narrative by telling what actually happened in last two paragraphs". This is explained in three opening paragraph, and literally first sentence is "if figures are accurate" proceeding to explain why they almost certainly aren't:

Quoting the story's opening below:

"If Valve's latest Steam Survey monthly figures are accurate, Steam on Linux enjoyed a very wild month of March. Steam on Linux is now above the 5% threshold and more than twice the size of the Steam on macOS marketshare.

Steam on Linux ended 2025 at around a 3.5% marketshare, dipped a bit in January, and fell to 2.23% in February. That's still much better than several years ago in the pre-Steam-Deck days when Steam on Linux was at around 1%. In absolute terms with the continued growth of the Steam user base, 2~3% was rather healthy considering all of its bumps over the past decade.

But Valve just published the Steam Survey results for March 2026 and they have never been so incredible for Linux... 5.33%! Steam on Linux was never above 5% and easily an all-time high for the Linux gaming marketshare, especially in absolute numbers. It was a massive 3.1% spike in March"

I.e. this growth is more than total supposed user base last month. This is obviously a massive statistical inaccuracy just hitting the limits of the error margin, as these numbers were tracked for many years, so we know what approximate number is. Error rate for these sorts of studies is usually 2-5% depending on sample size and methodology, so we're seeing the error rate manifest itself on massive differential reported.

It would really help if people took any decent class on statistics.

Seafile would probably work. Simple and fast. Not overloaded with useless, often broken, plugins.

They will also be replacing the LED lighting in the schools with candles, and heat will be provided by hand-stoked coal furnaces.

I can hardly believe any sizable establishment would use NextCloud.
NextCloud might be okay for home use, or a very small business.